19of28Detail of the ceiling in the workshop at Heidemann-Barrera ranch, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in Boerne, Texas. Emil Heidemann built his workshop using wood from ordnance boxes which were procured from his workplace at Camp Stanley. (Darren Abate/For the Express-News)Photo: Darren Abate, FRE / Darren Abate/Express-News

20of28A rain slicker and hats belonging to Emil Heidemann hang on the wall in a dimly-lit tool shed, undisturbed since his death in 1966, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, at Heidemann-Barrera ranch in Boerne, Texas. (Darren Abate/For the Express-News)Photo: Darren Abate, FRE / Darren Abate/Express-News

24of28Artifacts found on the property are stored in a shed at Heidemann-Barrera ranch, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in Boerne, Texas. (Darren Abate/For the Express-News)Photo: Darren Abate, FRE / Darren Abate/Express-News

25of28Artifacts found on the property are stored in a shed at Heidemann Ranch.Photo: Express-News file photo

26of28Artifacts found on the property are stored in a shed at Heidemann-Barrera ranch, Wednesday, May 25, 2016, in Boerne, Texas. (Darren Abate/For the Express-News)Photo: Darren Abate, FRE / Darren Abate/Express-News

27of28Grave markers of various Heidemann family members are seen at Heidemann Ranch.Photo: Express-News file photo

Working in the Civil War-era log cabin that he spent two years painstakingly restoring, artist Gilbert E. Barrera feels a sensation of timelessness.

“If you just stay in here for five or 10 minutes and close the doors, the quietnesss of it really takes you back in time,” he said. “You really get the feeling that you’re safe.”

Aside from enjoying the captivating aura of daylight penetrating single window, in what artists consider “true light,” Barrera has won praise from the San Antonio Conservation Society for preserving one of about 120 known historic farm and ranch properties in Bexar and surrounding counties — sites that tie the human values of courage and determination to the fields and homesteads that helped a frontier settlement evolve into a major city. His conservation work at the Heidemann-Barrera Ranch, at 26090 Toutant Beauregard Road in northwestern Bexar County, garnered a 2016 Building Award at the society’s annual preservation gala in March.

Joanna Parrish, a former conservation society president, led the group’s efforts in 2005 to begin saving old rural properties as a tribute to pioneers who endured hardships while working to feed the local population.

“If we’d not had these farms and ranches, I don’t think San Antonio would have survived,” Parrish said. “You think about how they lived, what they had and what they didn’t have. It’s important to know where we came from.”

Barrera, a sculptor and oil painter whose works include the Lady Justice statue at the Bexar County Courthouse, learned to appreciate how German immigrant Wilhelm “William” Heideman and his family hauled 1,200-pound logs over hill and dale — presumably with a horse and chain. With a mechanical loader and his on-site helper, Gabino Flores, Barrera turned the crumbling cabin, smokehouse and barn from ruins overrun by dirt daubers, turkey vultures and rattlesnakes to monuments to the past.

Replicating the cabin’s 1860s construction, Barrera shoveled mortar made from the ranch’s yellow caliche that had held the walls together, then deteriorated. He put it into containers and re-mixed it to rebuild the walls.

“I tried to replicate the exact construction, imagining if they were one or two people and I’m one or two people, how did they do it, and how can I redo it?” he said.

The ranch, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, is named for William Heidemann, who arrived in Texas at Galveston and renounced any allegiance to the King of Prussia to become a U.S. citizen, according to the conservation society. He and his wife Eliza and five sons raised cattle and grew corn and sweet potatoes. Two more generations of Heidemanns lived there, including a grandson, Emil Heidemann, who would climb trees on the property and hunt squirrels, rabbit and deer.

Emil, later a World War II veteran and civil servant at Camp Stanley, a military depot by Camp Bullis, built a shop out of ammunition crates where he did woodworking on the ranch. Barrera, wanting to add workspace to the 1930s shop, used scrap materials from the ranch — timbers, caliche, wood window frames and screens — to build an enclosed structure around the shop that resembles the 1860s cabin next to it. He treats the shop itself with reverence, leaving it filled with Heidemann’s old work hats, license plates, an antique radio and a calendar from 1966 — the year Heidemann died from a cerebral hemorrhage.

“This was his getaway,” Barrera said. “I haven’t moved anything on the workbench.”

Heidemann’s widow, Jewell Heidemann, took care of the ranch frugally, collecting rainwater in barrels from the roof of the garage after her water pump stopped working. Rather than selling the land to a housing developer, she accepted an offer from Gilbert’s father, Roy Barrera Sr., a prominent lawyer who had owned an adjacent family ranch since the 1970s. Under a life estate agreement, the ranch transferred to the Barreras when she died in 1999.

City Archaeologist Kay Hindes has called the restored five-acre ranch property, encircled by a 1860s-style zigzag fence of cedar posts and native wildflowers, “one of the most intact 19th-century vernacular farm and ranch complexes” near San Antonio. Gilbert Barrera “really did a wonderful job” researching and restoring the site, she said. The ranch buildings, which will serve as an arts complex, are the latest historic structures of their kind to be adaptively reused as offices, restaurants and other modern facilities with rustic ambiance.

“This is one of the few properties that have undergone stabilization and rehabilitation by the property owner, who initiated the work,” Hindes said. “Part of our challenge is to work with developers to help them recognize potential for adaptive reuse of these historic structures. These type of features really make iconic places.”

Hindes believes there may still be several historic rural properties not identified. But about 95 percent of them have been recognized, and about one-fourth are protected through local landmark designation or recognition as state or national historic places.

Barrera, who hosts an annual arts show at the ranch, views the historic site as the showpiece.

Scott Huddleston is a veteran staff writer at the San Antonio Express-News covering Bexar County Commissioners Court and county government.

He has been a reporter at the Express-News since 1985, covering a variety of issues, including public safety, flooding, transportation, military and veterans affairs, history and local government.

Huddleston covered the final construction phase of the SBC Center -- now AT&T Center, where the Spurs play -- in 2002, and wrote "Then&Now," a weekly historical feature, for the Sunday Metro section from 2001-2006.